Wednesday, March 5, 2008

The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change

Note that the conference described below received very little coverage in the mainstream media. That alone speaks volumes about who controls the media and why.Peter

The 2008 International Conference on Climate ChangeBy Joseph D’Aleo, CCMThe opening remarks of the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change by Joseph L. Bast, President of the Heartland Institute site can be seen here. It kicked off the best climate conference I have attended in my 30 years in the professional societies. The two day meeting featured over 100 excellent presentations made by scientists from Australia, Canada, England, France, Hungary, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, Sweden, and of course the United States. They came from the University of Alabama, Arizona State, Carleton, Central Queensland, Delaware, Durham, and Florida State University, George Mason, Harvard, The Institute Pasteur in Paris, James Cook, John Moores, Johns Hopkins, and the London School of Economics, the University of Mississippi, Monash, Nottingham, Ohio State, Oregon State, Oslo, Ottawa, Rochester, Rockefeller, and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, the Russian Academy of Sciences, Suffolk University, the University of Virginia, Westminster School of Business (in London), and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

There were keynote addresses by Pat Michaels, Bob Balling, Ross McKitrick, Bill Gray, Tim Ball, Fred Singer, Roy Spencer and John Stossel. All were excellent and very well received. The most inspirational moments though were thanks to an address by the very courageous President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, the only head of state of a major nation who “gets it”. A Ph.D. Economist by education, he was first elected president of the Czech Frepublic in 2003. The text of his speech will be posted in its entirety on the Heartland website shortly but here are a few highlights.

“What I see in Europe (and the U.S. and other countries as well) is a powerful combination of irresponsibility, of wishful thinking, of implicit believing in some form of Mathusianism, of a cynical approach of those who themselves are sufficiently well off, together with the strong possibility of changing the economic nature of things through a radical political project.As a politician who personally experienced communist central planning of all kinds of human activities, I feel obliged to bring back the already forgotten arguments used in the famous plan versus market debate in the 1930s in economic theory (between Mises and Hasyek on the one side and Lange and Lerner on the other), the arguments we have been using for decades - till the moment of the fall of communism. Then they were quickly forgotten. The innocence with which the climate alarmists and their fellow travelers in politics and mediia now present and justify their ambitions to mastermind human society belongs to the same “fatal conceit.” To my great despair, this is not sufficiently challenged neither in the field of social sciences, nor in the field of climatology. Especially the social sciences are suspicously silent.

We have to restart the discussion about the very nature of government and about the relationship between the individual and society. Now it concerns the whole makind, not just the citizens of one particular country. To discuss this means to look at the canonically structured theoretical discussion about socisalism (or communism) and to learn an uncompromising lesson from the inevitable collapse of communism 18 years ago. It is not about climatology. It is about freedom. This should be the main message of our conference.”

Icecap Note: The attendees left the conference with renewed vigor and enthusiam and many new contacts and ideas. Many told of countless others who wanted to join them but could not get time off from their jobs, could not afford the trip to New York City, or feared their attendance might affect their employment, a sad state of affairs. As I have noted this is not the sum total of the Climate Realists but the tip of the iceberg of what is very likely a silent majority of scientists in climatology, meteorology and allied sciences who do not endorse what is said to be the consensus position. There was a variety of opinions as there should be in science and all were tolerated. There was no group think or stagnant thinking as we find at other so called Climate Conferences. We thank the Heartland and the many other co-sponsors for their efforts in making this possible and so successful.-->